Great Smoky Mountains National Park Comments
What amazed me most during a six-hour visit last week to Great Smoky Mountains National Park was that it was free.
It is the most frequented national park in the county, with more than 9 million annual visitors, and the National Parks Service doesn’t charge a daily admission fee.
The densely forested park straddles eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina in the southern Appalachian Mountains.
When it became a national park in 1934, hundreds of people still had homesteads there. Agreements allowed many of those residents to live there until they died. A ranger told me that the last resident in the park, Kermit Coughorn, died in 1999.
We took the 11-mile loop drive through the meadows of what had been the rural community of Cades Cove. We saw number of buildings that had been preserved, including a Baptist Church, a grist mill, a schoolhouse and some of the homes.
We also saw horses, deer, wild turkey and a bear perched in a tree about 75 yards from the road. The black bear population of about 1,600 is near an all-time high after dwindling to estimated 300 to 500 just 20 years ago.
After Cades Cove, we headed to the popular Little River, which proved to be a perfect spot for swimming, tubing and cooling off on a hot June day.
As we later drove through other parts of the park, I was struck by the similarities to much of forested Oregon. The difference is that oak and other deciduous trees are dominate in the Great Smoky Mountains. So I’ve been told the my next visit should be in the fall when the colors are brilliant.
